Radiology plays an important role in the care process. Throughout the care cycle, multiple imaging studies are conducted on each patient. The images are typically acquired with more than one imaging modality, including computed tomography, magnetic resonance tomography, positron emission tomography, ultrasound and x-ray.
For each patient, it is essential to keep track of the development of abnormalities over time. This task becomes even more complex when multiple abnormalities need to be taken into account. Each abnormality must be assessed and possibly related to the corresponding abnormality in a previous study.
The status of each abnormality is described in many reports produced at the time of the study. The reports can be structured or unstructured. To track an abnormality over time one must thus interpret the content of these reports. This is a tedious and time-consuming task, prone to human errors. Erroneously combining different abnormalities in different reports may lead to misdiagnoses.
EP-2169577 A1 by Reuven Schreiber et al., entitled Method and system for medical imaging reporting, discloses a system that automatically matches a reporting template of an organ to medical imaging studies, thereby embedding diagnosis and images in it, and presenting the matched template to a radiologist for diagnosis. However, that system does not use the text of the report to determine the location or properties of an organ.